Embodying physics assessment: Reimagining formative assessment as a creative, multimodal, and culturally sustaining dialogic practice

Abstract

Background: Assessment has historically reinforced exclusion in science by positioning certain ways of knowing as legitimate and devaluing others. Rather than treating assessment as a neutral mechanism for measuring learning, we argue that it must be seen as a deeply cultural, relational, and creative dialogic process that can reproduce exclusion or open up new possibilities for participation. Methods: We engaged in micro-ethnographic analysis of videos across two dance-based assessment activities, observing the multiple ways youth participants incorporated their creative and cultural resources, identities, languages, and ways of knowing into the development, expression, and assessment of physics ideas. Findings: Using the lens of culturally sustaining formative assessment, we illustrate how assessment that draws on the cultural practices, ways of knowing, and identities of historically marginalized learners as resources can be leveraged to support physics sense-making. Our findings show how positioning youth as knowledgeable and centering their embodied and multimodal forms of expression as epistemic resources can support them in sharing their developing ideas, insights, and perspectives. Contribution: This paper offers a model of formative science assessment as an ongoing dialogic process for building understanding that is multimodal, embodied, and relational, rooted in cultural expression and collective sense-making.